This is something that really bothers me - all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists. New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.
Funny you say that because when I lived in New York a few years ago gentrification and high rents was the top complaint among residents (mainly around the time Brooklyn started getting unaffordable), and people would point to San Francisco as a city which had a lot of money but could still keep its artsy/counterculture roots intact.
I think folks on either coast don't understand the nuances each city faces unless they live there. Whatever remains of SF working artists will say the city has long sold out its counterculture roots.
New York is possible for artists because of public transit.
Artists don't live in Manhattan, they live in the outskirts, or once were the "outskirts", and commute to where is needed because the MTA works (for the most part).
The Bay Area's transit system is a mess (too many different agencies with inconvenient transfers between lines) so affordable, yet accessible neighborhoods beyond Oakland/San Leandro/Richmond are nil.
How many billions of dollars of tech money, in your opinion, is enough to find a way to house and support people in a city where planning is fundamentally structured around finding ways to not house people?
In California you can get whatever crazy thing you want passed with O($10M). I bet $1B could get even Prop 13 overturned which would solve the housing disaster overnight.
> 2020's Prop 19 to reform property taxes just a bit had about $20 million behind it, and it didn't even land on the ballot.
Correction: in 2020, Proposition 19 (which limited Proposition 13/58 property tax breaks for parent-child transfers to only farms and owner-occupied “family homes”) did pass 51%-49%, whereas Proposition 15 (which would have eliminated Proposition 13 tax breaks for commercial property) was on the ballot but failed 48%-52%.
I wonder when will tech companies will wise up and put some serious money towards lobbying for more housing for their employees.
Probably never because management don't care, highly-compensated workers will find a way, and many are moving to at least hybrid-remote anyway. But imagine what if big SF corporate money finally got sick of their headquarters being surrounded by homeless suffering and public sanitation problems and put some money towards systematically fixing it.
That's such a good idea that tech companies already agree with you and have done precisely that. You might look at Mountain View for an example of tech companies lobbying for more housing in action.
It's a good start that should've been pursued earlier the past decade, but really they should dream bigger and band together to take on Prop 13. They alone have the money to do so.
At the same time, I can think of few things with worse optics than big, fat, cash-rich tech companies full of big, fat, rich techies banding together to raise taxes on regular homeowners.
You'd need to end or severely restrict local zoning.
Everyone loves the idea of cheaper housing for people in theory.
Once they realize it means their own property value won't appreciate as quickly, or may even decrease and then suddenly they are against it. And they will vote out any officials that support it.
There needs to be state or federal intervention. And that doesn't seem likely at any time in the near future.
> all those billions of dollars of tech money and you cannot find a way to house and support artists.
Our problem is never that we don't have enough wealth, it's always that it's concentrated among a small percentage of the population, and a much larger percentage gets starved out entirely.
> New York billionaires have always found a way to support artistic endeavors. Case in point - Bloomberg, he personally donated a lot.
If we have to depend on the charity of billionaires, we've already lost the war.
Concentrated wealth sponsors high culture. There is extremely limited political will for public funding, and distributed personal spending decisions give you mass culture. You are not getting painters without people who spend tens of thousands on paintings. You are not getting the theater or the symphony or the opera without a class of attendees who write checks for hundreds of times more than a ticket is worth.
Because SF billionaires are selfish tourists. On the other hand, NYC has a long history of patronage and wealthy donors that contribute to making their city better.
Thankfully SF has people like Mark Zuckerberg, and is appreciative of his donation of a large amount of money to the city's hospital in order to improve life in the city.
Lol. A billionaire doesn't give money to $causeOfTheDay - they're "selfish" assholes.
They do give money - they're informed they can't buy forgiveness or they should have given more or the patronage is paternalistic and heaven forbid if the billionaire is a white male American.
May as well keep your money and let those fend for themselves.
Much better art created when people do it for the passion.. on their own time.. with their own resources.. after they've worked an 8 hour day.
Whingers are going to complain anyway - no point in affording them the time and resources to do it more.
